Chapter Two:

From ms. DEMOCRACY, RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS by Dan Lyons, Peter Lang Press, published in 2000

 

Change and Action and Power in a ‘Downhill' World

The Strange Tendency to Admire Action-As-Such
Acting can be understood as causing a change. A change must be from state A to state B. This strongly suggests that if you rationally value Action X, it's because you value state B that X moved toward. So it seems that Action as such can't be rationally revered--only beneficial actions, only actions that change things for the better. (Should we admire the generation of creative deodorant ads? Creative cigarette ads? Cheap land-mines? Cheap Crack? Clever germ-weapons?)

Ordinary people all over the world, though, (and many sages in the West--but not in the East, and not Plato in the West)--do seem to say, "The more Action, the better!" They start out admiring the Mover and the Shaker--unless they hear that he caused wholesale destruction--and even then maybe, a little.... Why is this strange perspective so universal?

Why Do People Presume  that Action is Good?
People note the obvious truth that practical wisdom is useless if it's not implemented in action. Undergraduates in the 1960's were always taunting philosophers with Marx's maxim: "The point is not to understand society, but to change it!" (The action-oriented undergrads labelled any other thought as ‘mental masturbation'.) And even Aristotle noted approvingly that  the Olympic prize goes not to the best runner, but to the one who actually runs and wins. He compared the person who studied ethics only theoretically  with the fool who studied medical remedies carefully, but never used them.

Action from a Socratic Perspective:
"Yes, but typically action does implement knowledge and good sense--especially my actions!" Each of us recognizes there are things he doesn't understand. Luckily, those very ‘blind-spots' always seem to be unimportant  in the context of evaluating action. The slob thinks that all ‘book-learning' is relatively unimportant for vital decisions.The expert (who's a layman in every field but one) tends to think that  any book-learning outside his field is unimportant.
 
However, if we imagine the Dramatic Actions to be expected from our foolish brother-in-law if he suddenly got powerful-- then we should see that this presumption of typical wisdom  is shaky. (The previous chapter on Human Motivation strongly suggests that  we shouldn't presume that  typical decision-makers are strongly eager to act wisely, avoiding distant-future risks to strangers.)

The Invisible Hand:
"There is an Invisible Hand (the Free Market) working in our world that weaves together countless selfish, half-smart actions into a beneficial tapestry." For several centuries this seemed plausible; but suddenly we find that the spontaneous Tapestry features nuclear proliferation, the Ozone Hole, Global Warming, technological unemployment, exponential population growth. That Great Invisible Hand seems to be losing Its Touch, perhaps its Grip.

Action is Part of Human Nature:
Thorstein Veblen claimed plausibly, in THE INSTINCT OF WORKMANSHIP,  that humans have a quasi-innate instinct to want to move and shake things, to make a difference, to leave our mark, to do the job well. Mozart is moved to make great music; the local moron is moved  to spray-paint his name hugely on pristine cliffs. A dog discovers one night that she can make a great racket effortlessly by rubbing an empty plastic bleach bottle across a rough cement surface.

If such an instinct to act exists, it would explain this strange reverence for Action, without justifying it. Plato, the Great Skeptic, would not share the general enchantment with Action-as-such. He insisted, in Gorgias, that actions are good-only-if  they improve the world. And he did not presume that Dramatic Actions are usually beneficial. In fact, his disenchantment might have stemmed from  an important principle laid out later by his pupil Aristotle: "There are always more ways to go wrong than to go right." Blind changes should be presumed harmful--and most dramatic actions, actions that cause significant side-effects, should be presumed to be  blind enough to be harmful.

Blind Change in a ‘Downhill' Universe:
Imagine that you've built a very good, very complex sand-castle on the beach, a castle which is not quite perfect. You leave it unprotected for two weeks, while random winds and rains and tides act on it vigorously. When you see it again, it is conceivable that the random forces of nature might have operated in just such a way as to improve the castle. But this happy possibility is incredibly unlikely--so unlikely that many readers would say it is just inconceivable. Not so--one could imagine such a chance improvement--but it is, for all practical purposes, impossible. Instead, you know in advance what you'll find: the sand components of the castle reduced to a shapeless mound.This is an important general fact about our world: desired states are usually  ‘organized' [e.g., the sand-castle in good condition is organized minimally, to mimic a castle], and so are inherently unlikely. (The castle could never come into existence just by chance--that is, such a happening is so incredibly improbable  as to be practically impossible.)

In other words, there are far fewer ‘good, organized' situations than ‘bad, chaotic' situations (the shapeless mound of sand), among situations that are abstractly possible. And highly organized states are  even more unlikely  than roughly organized ones; and random improvements of highly organized states are incredibly unlikely; there's little ‘room for improvement'.  So random change  operating on a partially-organized system  is overwhelmingly likely to change it for the worse.  It's a ‘downhill' world.

Here I want to present several examples illustrating this crucial point, showing how obviously true it is (yet its full implications are rarely realized).

§        A girl asks her father, "Why do my things keep getting out of place?" He answers, "For each thing, far more places count as ‘out of place' than as ‘in place'." If she just throws something in from the door, it's very unlikely that the item will land ‘in place' by chance. That's what Aristotle meant when he said "There are always more ways to go wrong than to go right." It's a ‘downhill' world.

§        Suppose on a steep hill there is a great boulder. It's firmly planted in the ground now; you want to move it uphill; you could dislodge it with an explosion. But what are the chances that  the random forces of the explosion would move it uphill? Almost nil. The likely outcome is that the boulder would end up further downhill than before.

We could think of this ‘tendency toward likely disorganization' as being analogous to the force of gravity. Blind change tends to move things ‘downhill' [toward 'deprovement'].

§        Suppose a bullet rips through your abdomen. It could theoretically avoid all organs and nip off a tiny cancer on the tip of your bladder. Don't bet on it.

§        Radiation works chance mutations on organic cells--practically all these mutations are destructive.

Lovers of change often cite the natural evolutionary process as instantiating the need for constant innovation. But that process is very, very conservative: normally, 99% of the offspring resemble the parents; fewer than 1 in 1000 offspring are markedly innovative. (This is lucky, since most mutations are harmful.) After all, when a new improvement is ‘discovered', it must be imprinted stably (not eternally) on future generations!

Nobody claims that present day organisms can adjust without damage to really drastic changes: a cat put into a microwave might as ell have no heat-adjustment mechanism at all. While drastic changes in ecosystems might, over millions of years, produce a super-intelligent race (perhaps descended from dolphins), that is no consolation for us.

 Wave after wave of drastic changes in environment might quickly improve for survival those creatures with very short generation-times (e.g., viruses); but such constant change is clearly bad for species with slow generation-times, such as elephants or humans.

 "Ah, but humans can adjust to changes psychologically, not just biologically." But often they don't; Russians and Yugoslavs adapted catastrophically to their non-violent revolutions; many African-American males here have adjusted badly to rapid social changes.

Suppose you're lost in a trackless wasteland. Suppose that there's some (small) chance that a rescue helicopter could reach you before you perish--so you could have something to lose  by moving around. But if you could move in the right direction, you could reach a  place of safety in time. [A-moves are helpful; B-moves are harmful.]

Interpretation: There are far more B-type moves than A-type moves  that are possible here. So any random motion from point X is very likely to be a B-type change, is very likely to count as deprovement (You won't reach the oasis;the helicopter won't find you; you'll wear yourself out and perish prematurely.) What to do?

In such a strange situation, my advice is this:  Don't Just Do Something! Stand There!

In fact, this type of situation would be our usual one, if the only changes we could make were completely blind ones.  Far more imaginable changes count as deprovement than as improvement; and typically we don't have to do something right now. So if our moves were completely blind and random, we'd be foolish to do anything!

Luckily, though, our actions are usually based on some degree of foresight, and are usually constrained by some degree of concern for good consequences. However, our concern may be mainly  for effects on ourselves and our ‘in-group'; often when we act, we don't even think of  possible effects on strangers and foreigners, effects on the general environment. In such cases, when our concern is so narrowly focussed, it's as if our actions are completely blind--relative to society at large, relative to the environment. 

Natives using ‘slash-and-burn' agriculture, settlers converting forests into cash-crop farms, people wanting to leave behind them a dozen grandchildren--such agents don't think  or care about the distant-future risks--especially the risks for strangers--caused by their actions. And many ‘elite' decision-makers, in governments and corporations, have displayed surprising recklessness or negligence  about the world at large.(Officials in charge of transfusion-blood have again and again neglected to screen AIDS-infected blood  even when this was possible--dooming many patients.)

Elephants knock down trees to eat the leaves. When enough elephants show up, the local forest is destroyed, and they must migrate. If they fill their whole environment, disaster happens for the forest and for them. North Africa was once a fertile place; it was converted to desert as soon as humans got collectively powerful enough to destroy it. Our whole biosphere is now at risk, since human actions now have world-shaking effects. (Our moves to cool our houses and cars, to dry-clean our clothes, to use spray deodorants, turned out to weaken significantly the ozone-blocking of harmful UV rays all over the world for the next few decades, even if we quit pumping chemicals into the stratosphere today.)

Ozone holes luckily showed up first in the uninhabited Antarctic, then later in the Arctic Circle; so many people felt they could ignore the problem. However, in Spring 1997, an ozone HOLE showed up over Moscow and St. Petersburgh! (Another hole, twice the size of Texas, developed over a less-densely inhabited area of Russia.)

Partially Random Changes:
When we do have some foresight and concern  for the broader effects of our actions, then we can say that our actions have four conceivable kinds of effects:                         
                                           

Now the side-effects of partly-controlled actions  have the same properties as the total effects  of completely random actions: these side-effects could conceivably be beneficial, but it's very, very likely  that they will be, in the net, harmful.
Good, unplanned side-effects are very rare (because of the ‘downhill' tendency of ‘blind change' discussed earlier).For instance, when we found out that our chemicals were thinning the ozone layer, (and we knew about the bad effects of this thinning), we might have hoped that some unforeseen benefits from the thinning  might outweigh the damages. But this would be a foolish hope, and indeed no one seriously suggested this possibility.

When new drugs turn out to have beneficial, unplanned side-effects, this situation is news! The unplanned side-effects are practically always bad, in the net. So the hope is to  restrict the total power of all side-effects.

A more homely example: My quarter-acre lot has 26 trees. I have been using an electric lawn-mower with a 30-foot-extension cord. I try (with my usual carelessness) to keep the cord untangled. But the number of conceivable cord configurations  where the cord counts as ‘tangled' is staggeringly high  compared to the number of ways the cord can count as untangled. So it regularly ends up tangled in branches,etc. (In fact, a long extension cord seems to tangle itself perversely  just hanging in the garage! So does a collection of many rubber-bands on a door-knob.)

Implications of the Insight that Side-Effects are Mainly Bad:
This obvious principle has surprisingly strong implications. As our actions get more and more powerful (while our degree of benevolent foresight advances much more slowly) we approach the time when the total side-effects (good & bad) will outweigh the total planned effects. Then, since the side-effects are mainly bad, the bad side-effects will tend to outweigh the good planned effects--so the overall effects of such powerful, dramatic actions will also be bad. We seem to be nearing that stage in our human history: the side-effects of human interventions in the world forests, the oceans, the polar regions, the stratosphere, and human sperm-count (!) are staggering.

Optimists used to say that human actions were puny compared to volcanoes, earthquakes, etc. But this is simply not so: the relocation of huge masses of water in reservoirs all over the world has actually modified slightly the rotation of the earth!

There is now a general consensus among scientists and government officials that human activities have significantly affected (a) the ozone layer and (b) the mean temperature of the earth. The benefits of further industrialization (for the middle-class people who will mainly profit from them) and population-increase, on the other hand, seem dubious. There's less room for real improvement.

If we are not yet at that stage (where bad side-effects swamp good planned effects), we are heading in that direction--the ratio of side-effects to planned good effects is steadily increasing. We have reason to worry--the stakes are awesome, so it's rational not to take even a small chance of world-disaster happening.

This worry actually is confirmed by common-sense analogies. New drugs must be tested (for dangerous side-effect) on small samples, before they are released for general use. Significant side-effects would usually outweigh a new drug's benefits. No sensible corporate executive would implement a sudden, radical change in his complex system  without first trying a small-scale ‘pilot-project' to discover unwelcome side-effects. No corporation would drastically alter some successful software without trying small-scale ‘field-tests' before releasing the new software for general use.

In other words, when agents have clear ‘selfish' reasons  to care about all effects on some system, they routinely avoid sudden broad, dramatic changes  for fear of damaging, unforeseen side-effects  which render the changes harmful-overall. The general presumption against partially-blind actions  is embodied in the popular maxim: "If it ain't really broke (i.e., if dramatic intervention is not necessary) then don't fix it!" The problem is that most agents simply don't care much  about long-run risks to the world in general.

There is no reason to revere Action-as-such; and there is very little reason to presume that  dramatic actions (partially controlled by wise benevolence) are beneficial.

Circumstances Alter Values:
Athenians in Plato's day saw very clearly--as secularists see today--that morality cannot be expressed in Commandments that say "X is always wrong, no matter what!"  We all agree that Circumstances Alter Cases--moral cases.

But Athenians then, and liberals today, don't seem so cautious  in evaluating actions/powers non-morally. We have principles favoring Autonomy, Liberty, Energy, Action, in all cases.

Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes said explicitly that we must define ‘liability for damages' very laxly, lest we discourage Action and Change. And Bill Gates was quoted recently as saying that the great virtue of Americans was the way they welcome Change.

However, circumstances alter these values also, not just moral cases. We tend to think the only two alternatives are  Progress or Regress, (moving backwards). We forget the very real possibility of Degress, moving forward and ‘down': toward a new, worse situation.

Socrates saw things differently; he may have been inspired by Hippocratic medicine, emphasizing that any given medicine is useful for one disease, but harmful for another--and also that this medicine might be helpful  at one stage of a disease, yet fatal at another stage of the same disease. Socrates generalized this caution, saying that no definitely-described actions are always good; their value depends on their context.
 
Aristotle noticed the obvious fact that, in going systems, there are far more ways to go wrong than to go right. So we can't count on partly-blind, dramatic actions, actions with significant uncontrolled side-effects--we can't count on such actions being overall-beneficial just by luck.

The common desire for Change, the general fascination with Action, the admiration most people feel for Movers and Shakers, for People Who Make a Difference--this common attitude is not very rational.

Powers ... Splendid Only If ...

I have claimed that people tend to over-value dramatic Action, as such, often admiring and imitating actions which change the situation trivially--or harmfully (as evaluated from the 'social' point of view, accounting for side-effects on strangers and on the World System).

An even stronger mistaken tendency is  to admire and covet the resources for dramatic Action: those internal states and external assets  which facilitate action (including the absence of constraints--liberty is valued as the absence of coercion).
Most people want intensely to see themselves as  pridefully splendid, not humiliated as pathetic. Most want to be admired and envied by others, not pitied, ridiculed, or despised. And there are common aesthetic standards in each society  deciding which types of people are to be admired, which held in scorn.If we asked ordinary Americans to list  the attributes which they count as ‘splendid' or ‘pathetic', we might hear the following  qualities & assets  mentioned:

 
What's striking about these two lists is the way  the ‘splendid assets' tend to facilitate successful accomplishment  of short-run and middle-run projects (whatever projects we happen to have), while the pathetic list is  of traits that leave agents  less likely to succeed at their short-run and middle-run projects.

Now an obvious difficulty leaps out here, with two variants:

1.      Suppose the agent's immediate projects foolishly undermine his own long-run interests. Then the qualities that make these harmful projects successful  should hardly count as splendid--why should we call 'splendid' a person who harms himself efficiently in the long run?! But we do.  We've heard of jiu-jitsu where a giant's clumsy strength can be used against him. But we'd hesitate to label this strength as a humiliating defect, even in the context of incurable clumsiness.

We would see such clumsy power as ridiculous in a cartoon  where the mighty, snorting bull charges at the little guy, who ducks and watches the bull hurtle over the cliff. Here the strength backfires in the short run; but  if a man is destroyed in the long run by his strong, brave, unwise actions, we tend to feel sadness  at such a ‘splendid hero' ending up in defeat. Is this consistent? Reason says No; but imagination approves of this difference-- and ‘splendid/pathetic' are at root imagination-terms, (even though aesthetic standards of conduct can be quite complex logically).

 

2.      Or suppose Joe's projects tend to harm strangers or the World System, overall. Why should we admire  traits of Joe's that make him better able to harm us?  But we often do. (We're not that different from the ancients. Even after the splendid traitor Alcibiades betrayed Athens' military secrets to Sparta, he came back and got elected again. The average Athenian feared and resented Alcibiades--but also admired and envied that bold and clever rogue.)

Qualities that facilitate one's short-run projects should be admired  only insofar as those projects contribute to the long-run ‘greater good for the greater number' or benefit the World. Resources (e.g., boldness, cleverness, political power, money) are  good only if they're likely to be devoted to projects that are really beneficial in the long run. This sounds trite and obvious. Socrates made this point ["Only useful deeds count as splendid; only harmful acts count as pathetic or ridiculous."] but this point has been ignored or rejected since then by ordinary people--and also by some great thinkers: e.g., Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls.

Able to Win:
Why do people tend to admire a person's ability to succeed at  whatever projects he happens to have? (They might say, "He's unprincipled, even self-destructive in the long-run; but you have to admire his pluck and cleverness!"  Why do we have to?)

There's one family of projects where these assets/defects are vividly relevant: the splendid traits make one more likely to win, and the pathetic traits make one likely to lose, in whatever contests one engages in. People have a quasi-innate desire to win, and not to lose. Some studies suggest that dominant primate males ('winners') have more pleasant states of brain-serotonin--remember the lordly relaxation of the master lion! ‘Loser' males are nervous and agitated.

And then society (especially in America!) reinforces this ‘drive to win': here we praise any splendid human as a ‘winner' (and scorn inneffectual people as ‘losers'), even if they are involved in completely non-competitive activities!

Perhaps this is how it works: from childhood on, one finds that one delights in winning, one hates to lose--in races or in card-games. (This instinct is a hangover from the primitive times when winning meant surviving and getting a chance to breed.) At first, contests are physical; so young boys admire mainly strength and agility. Then older children come to realize that the contests that count in modern society are the mental contests. So they come to admire cleverness and perseverance. 

The psychological laws of association say that  when we like A, and B reminds us of A, we come to value B also. Enjoying winning, we come to value ‘able-to-win'; hating to lose, we come to scorn  people unable to avoid losing. Thence we move to admiring all qualities that facilitate any short-run projects.

This love of winning, as noted before, is not always wise or prudent. Xenophon says that all Athenians agreed that fighting is not good unless you win. But only Socrates went around asking, "Yes, but when is winning good?"  Twenty-five centuries later, people quote Vince Lombardi's sage remark: "Winning is not the best thing; winning is the only thing!" We haven't learned much in all that time.
 
Winning a battle might lead to losing a war. Adolph Hitler must have had some dissenters among his generals when he planned to invade Russia. But he won the debate, invaded Russia, and ultimately thereby destroyed his Thousand-Year Reich.

In obvious cases, we see the folly of saying: "We've lost our direction; we must redouble our speed."  But we bridle a little at the Socratic insight that speed is a defect in a blind horse.

Insofar as we can explain the non-rational process  by which admiration comes to be almost universal for the 'splendid' traits above, we needn't suppose that this universal agreement must be accepted as a valid intuition. Indeed, harmful traits are all the more dangerous for being glamorous!

For or Against Power?
Homeric Greeks admired the obvious military powers that distinguished their heroes: the strength of Ajax, the heroism of Achilles, the cunning of Odysseus.

On the other hand, one prominent strain of Christianity labels power as bad and weakness as good. Even moral weakness (akrasia in Greek) is praised often in Paul's epistles: God tells Paul, "My strength is confirmed in your weakness!" And Paul notes that God has revealed his new message mainly to the weak and foolish, not to the wise philosophers.

Jesus proclaimed as Blessed (admirable and enviable) those who are poor and meek and persecuted--the losers; while he scorned the rich and powerful. And Mary in her Magnificat describes how God will put down the mighty and raise up the humble, will fill the hungry while sending the rich away empty.

Socrates and Plato would disagree with both of these sweeping views (the Homeric and the Christian). They'd note first that there's no such thing as power! It's a logical mistake to see power as some one invisible force-field, like electricity. Only specific powers exist: able-to-do-X-in-situation-Y. So it makes no sense to revere or despise power as such. Each specific able-to-X must be evaluated separately.

"Power to do what?" is logically similar to ‘twice as much as..what?' Deciding that 'Power is better than Weakness' is like saying that Twice-as-much is more than Half-as-Much (when twice 4 is actually less than half of 100!)
 
How evaluate each power? Well, ‘able-to-X' is meaningless  without knowing what Action-X is; this strongly suggests that able-to-X-in-situation-Y derives its value or disvalue from the value of Doing X in Y situation. A book called Effective vs. Efficient Computing says that before we glory in 'doing the thing right', we should make sure we're doing the right thing.

We've already claimed that the value of doing X, of changing the situation from state A to state B, is derived from the value of state B. Only improving actions are reasonably valued; only the ability to improve things is reasonably admired.

Should we always admire bravery and self-discipline and energy and perseverance? Not if these ‘virtues' are harnessed to foolish or wicked projects. Courage enables me to pursue my goals in the face of danger; self-discipline (temperance) enables me to slog on, not distracted by seductive pleasures. If I'm slogging on in the wrong direction, it would be better if I were scared off or seduced away from my bad project. Cowardice and pleasure-addiction could, in some situations, make for a lesser evil!
 

Will more money make you ‘better off?’
Most economists see an increase of purchasing-power for Joe as automatically making Joe better off.  But Socrates thought this is so only if Joe knows how to use the money well.   Nor would Socrates assume that foolish Joe will probably, just by luck, put any extra money to a good use--remember the ‘downhill' universe! Money is just another form of power.

In Gorgias Socrates implicitly compares increased wealth to increased calories. It's true that more calories leave a person better off  if he is an athlete exercising strenuously and intelligently, with his diet controlled by an intelligent trainer. (Also, Socrates would admit that usually more calories are good for someone who's half-starving now.) But for most greedy, comfortable people, more available calories are an index of poorer health. Similarly, for most foolish, comfortable people, more money will likely be misused to leave them worse off. (For one thing, the increased money will lead to stronger addiction to spending.)

TECHNOLOGY

Around 1900  Western thinkers saw technical progress as humankind's greatest hope. They looked forward optimistically to the twentieth century. Now, looking back, we can see a century of slaughter and destruction. What went wrong?

KNOWING HOW AND KNOWING WHETHER:
Western Man, from the time of the Greeks, has always admired Know-How. The chorus in Sophocles' Antigone expressed this tendency clearly:

Wonders are many; and none is more wonderful than man:
the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south-wind,
making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him;
and Earth, the eldest of the gods, the immortal, the unwearied, doth he wear down,
turning the soil with the offspring of horses; and the ploughs go to and fro
from year to year.
And the light-hearted race of birds, and the tribes of savage beasts,
and the sea-brood of   the deep, he snares in the meshes of his woven toils:
he leads them captive, man excellent in wit.
And he masters by his arts  the beast whose lair is in the wilds, who roams the hills;
he tames the horse of shaggy mane, he puts the yoke on its neck,
he tames the tireless mountain bull.
And speech, and windswift thought, and all the moods that mould a state--
these hath he taught himself;
and how to flee the arrows of the frost,
when 'tis hard lodging under the clear sky--and the arrows of the rushing rain;
yea, he hath resouce for all; without resource he meets nothing that must come:
only against Death shall he call for aid in vain;
but from baffling maladies he hath devised escapes.
Cunning beyond fancy's dream is the fertile skill that brings him,now to evil,
now to good...

We value know-how. But imagine teaching an eight-year-old boy how to drive: how to turn the ignition, work the gears and pedals, how to steer. He might use this know-how to do good, to take his sick mother to the hospital. But what counts is what's probable, not what's possible; and disaster is what's probable if he exercises his know-how.  The boy lacks know-whether: knowing whether to drive this fast under these conditions, etc. Not only does he lack this prudence; he doesn't realize that extra prudence is needed.

Three facts emerge from this example:

1.      Knowing-how-to-X is usually easier to acquire  than knowing whether to do X. Know-how usually turns out to be a set of narrow skills, expeditiously acquired. Know-whether, on the other hand, involves predicting and assessing consequences of various kinds, weighing long-run risks and benefits intelligently, etc.

2.      Know-how turns ‘sour', harmful without adequate know-whether. Know-how without know-whether is incompetence: it makes you less able to pursue your long-range goals. (In our ‘downhill' world, it's very unlikely that new degrees of ‘know-how' will result, just by chance, in beneficial actions.)

3.      A higher degree of know-how requires a higher degree of know-whether  to keep it from ‘souring'. An eight-year-old boy can be trusted, perhaps, with a bicycle--but not with a car.

Now consider technical know-how. It's usually far easier to invent a new chemical (e.g., the CFC's) than to predict all the biological, atmospheric, ecological, psychological and social consequences of the widespread use of that chemical (e.g, damage to the ozone layer). Evaluating such effects requires a sophisticated knowledge of ethics, plus good-will and good-sense.

In the old legend of the sorceror's apprentice, the master-sorcerer was imagined to have the wisdom to control his extra powers, but his apprentice gets in trouble because he has the ‘know-how' without the ‘know-whether'. It's suggested here that many human decision-makers today are in the position of the sorceror's apprentice.

Just as there are limits on the prudence of an eight-year-old, so there are limits on the benevolent prudence of typical adult decision-makers. It's perfectly possible that technical progress will make them know how to do various things, without their being able (or much inclined) to control their new powerful actions  by intelligent concern for indirect, unobvious, long-range effects on strangers and on environment.
 
No matter how tolerant those ‘know-whether' limits actually are, fast-increasing know-how will eventually crash against those limits!

What follows from all this? Since knowing-how-to-X is easier to ‘produce' than knowing-whether-to-X, know-how must pull ahead destructively) of know-whether eventually--unless the development of know-how is somehow curbed, or the development of know-whether is accelerated.

HAS THIS ALREADY HAPPENED?
Common-sense suggests that knowing how to do many technical stunts (e.g., building robots and biotechnology) has already pulled ahead of  knowing whether to implement these stunts (so robots render unemployable  huge numbers of the 90 million extra people now showing up each year; biotechnology introduces new organisms into niches where they face no natural enemies).

Scientists crossed a human AIDS virus with a mouse-virus and produced an AIDS virus that could be spread by breathing! (SCIENCE Magazine). This virus was successfully isolated; but in another incident, a Yale scientist got splattered when working with a rare, awful virus; confident that his protective gear made him safe, he contacted 75 people before he showed symptoms.

The real worry is that biotech techniques will be shown to be feasible and profitable in countries like ours, with careful precautions; then such techniques might be imitated in societies with few safeguards--just as the clumsy Russians imitated our nuclear plants at Chernobyl. If a bad new organism ‘gets loose' in some other country, modern commerce and travel might spread it all over the world.

Many modern chemicals happen to mimic the effect of female hormones. The average number of sperm in the average man's semen, in many parts of the world, is falling so fast that one expert foresees the end of traditional procreation by 2050. [Other scientists disagree; but this is now a real possibility.]

As soon as humans could weaken the ozone layer, we did; as soon as we could trigger the 'greenhouse effect', we did; as soon as we could decimate world fish-stocks and start destroying the rain-forests, we did.]

A CRASH PROGRAM TO MAKE HUMANKIND WISER?
The hope for a huge, quick increase in human wisdom is a wan hope indeed.  

’Know-whether' has several rather rare components:

§        (a) caring intensely about consequences for everyone;

§        (b) scientific prediction of all likely consequences of each new technical invention--with the clear communication of these predictions to relevant decision-makers;

§        and  (c) careful and impartial balancing of good and bad likely consequences, including remote ones--and including the rational balancing of risks.

Chapter One on Human Motivation explained why I think  decision-makers are not likely to care enough about risks to strangers and environment. That chapter also explains why philosophers should worry that average voters and politicians  won't learn enough practical science  to predict accurately the consequences of various policies.  Constant learning is necessary to judge wave after wave of new discoveries. (The average young U.S. citizen is just about as ignorant as his parents; indeed, young people read newspapers and magazines less and watch less TV news. Only 3 in 10 Americans follow news of major scientific advances. ) And there is much empirical evidence that most people simply do not think rationally when facing small risks of disaster. Nor can most people understand the logic of comparative probabilities, or the logic of normative thinking. Perhaps technical progress has robbed foolish mankind of our main virtue: our weakness.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?
It would help if we diverted much money from Research for New Inventions to ‘technology-assessment' research  to learn better how to monitor remote, unobvious side-effects of new discoveries.(Strangely, even though we know that increased UV bombardment of earth is inevitable for the next fifty years, there has been relatively little research about  the biological effects of this bombardment. Also, we must focus our school system (and our families), and our journalistic media, to spread this monitor-information widely (and accurately) among voters and elite decision-makers.

We might also divert research money away from destabilizing changes (e.g., away from food and medical research promoting death-control--which makes experts predict a possible human population of 9  billion by 2050 A.D.), toward research about restabilizing changes (e.g.. motivating ordinary people to restrict their births severely).

And of course it's obvious that we should divert money from military research to civilian research. We must never forget how much of technical progress has consisted in better ways to kill and maim people: from cheap handguns and automatic weapons and explosives (for private individuals) to ingenious land-mines and chemical weapons and germ-warfare, not to mention nuclear weapons, for governments and terrorist groups.

Several times over the years, the U.S. military has been wrongly informed by its computer-networks that Soviet missiles had already been launched at us, calling for an immediate ‘use-'em-or-lose-'em' counter-launch. Each time, luckily, the humans waited till the computer-errors were straightened out.As recently as 1995, the Russians were mistakenly informed that U.S. missiles were on their way to Russia; they were one stop from a counter-launch when the mistake was realized.

It seems that most people in industrial societies are a little less ruthless about face-to-face killing than people in primitive societies. (Someone has said that modern man is not more moral, just more queasy.) However, technical advances have negated that modest advance in civilization: decent U.S. bombing crews managed to leave 30 million bomb-craters in Vietnam, (in an area about the same as an average U.S. State) unleashing more explosives on that tiny nation than were set off all over the world, by all sides, in World War II, and killing about 4 million people in a population of            million--and all this destruction turned out to be pointless; the Communists took over anyway.   The huge increase in mankind's ability to kill thoughtlessly has more than compensated for any small increase
in our reluctance to kill.   [CHART]

Unfortunately, Congress in '95 seemed bent on cutting civilian research severely, while preserving or increasing funds for military research. The worst effect of this change will be to divert even more scientific talent and resources away from helpful research and into harmful or useless research.) Militarism is the ‘steroid' of the Body Politic; at first you feel like Rambo; then the man--or the society--
goes impotent.

Not much fast, wholesale progress  in making humankind wise  can be expected. Schumacher said sagely that humans are far too clever to survive without wisdom. Since our wisdom remains so hard to improve, it's perhaps too bad we've gotten so clever.

MOVING INERTIA:
Moving Inertia is a common physical/psychological phenomenon. Suppose I am sleeping as a passenger in a car speeding down a mountainside: as long as the car accelerates smoothly, I'll feel comfortable; but if the driver steps on the brakes, I'll wake with an alarmed jolt. Yet objectively I should be more alarmed at the acceleration down the hill than about a (moderate) braking. Accelerating feels like standing still; restabilizing (braking) feels like a dangerous change.

There is an analogous phenomenon in society; once we are committed to ever-accelerating technical/social innovation, such acceleration feels normal; whereas slowing down suddenly (even though it may be rationally necessary for safety) feels like a dangerous innovation.

Today, when a world carbon-tax is proposed to stabilize the level of greenhouse-gases in the world atmosphere, ‘hard-minded' critics note that such a tax might cut economic growth--so they demand that the pessimists PROVE the danger from global warming. But surely it is those who advocate letting the atmosphere careen into a new path (especially when some real chance of disaster can be foreseen)--such advocates of uncontrolled, dramatic change  must offer evidence that this acceleration is safe!

Advocates of unrestrained capitalism call themselves conservative. But the system they want to conserve is itself the most revolutionary, destabilizing force in history. They're like the fool who wants to conserve acceleration moving down a mountainside, because that feels conservative! 

Advocates of uncontrolled growth read the writings of early defenders of progress, who were lonely heretics in a truly-conservative social scene. Then these contemporary growth-fans see themselves also as brave,lonely heretics--forgetting that their position is the new Orthodoxy, backed by the Authorities as well as by Money and Political Power.  Once again we see the fallacy of Moving Inertia.

Dr. Teller, ‘the Father of the H-Bomb', tried to start a movement of Progressive Conservatives, who would favor uncontrolled technical innovation, but then fight social changes. But it's obvious that dramatic technical changes automatically trigger changes in man's social situation (consider the automobile)--and these changes in social situation make institutional adjustments absolutely necessary.

The 'Aristotelian Principle' (that unplanned side-effects are almost always bad) strongly suggests that  dramatic actions with significant side-effects  usually do more harm than good, unless users are very cautious and scrupulous about avoiding actions with either known bad effects or likely significant side-effects. Chapter One explained why we can't expect  typically-heedless human agents to be this scrupulous. So, now that our collective human powers are so formidable, we should now presume that (typical) dramatic actions will do more harm than good, in the long run.That means we have little reason now to admire the POWERS that facilitate action: money and political power and technology, or the cleverness, boldness, perseverence etc. that we have hitherto seen automatically as virtues. The angels might be lamenting over us as the farmer did about his teen-age sons: Why do they get so soon big, and so late smart?
 
ONE PERSPECTIVE ON MANY VALUES TO BE ANALYZED:
Understanding that all powers are good or bad only in certain contexts, we can set up many quite-disparate items to be evaluated rationally: technology, wealth, democracy (voting power), courage, self-discipline, cleverness and skills.We can deplore the capacities and opportunities of reckless humans.

We can try to empower wise and benevolent people. One of the saddest results of the ‘hippie' movement in the sixties was the categorical rejection of self-discipline and logic, based partly on distaste for the way these powers were used by the ‘Establishment'.

The ideal system for training leaders would select good-hearted, sensible, courageous, disciplined young ‘natural leaders' for benevolence, humility and fair-mindedness--and then train these elite youths rigorously in mathematics, logic and science, and expose them to the rigorous study of humanities and social science.

 [ We will see later the absurdity of the claim that FREEDOM IS INDIVISIBLE..again, that's like saying that 'twice as much' is always more than 'half as much'! There's no such thing as FREEDOM..only freedom for P-type persons from X-constraint to do Y, in Z situation. Different freedoms obviously have different values or disvalues in different social contexts.]